Chomsky's Saussure

Chomsky's Saussure

Roy Harris

Publisher:

Edinburgh University Press

DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748613083.003.0009

This chapter analyses Noam Chomsky's view and interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas about linguistics, explaining that there seems to be no indication that Chomsky had ever read or paid any attention to the work of Saussure until 1959 and that the first mention of Saussure in Chomsky's paper was in 1963. It suggests that Chomsky welcomed the ideas of Saussure because he was looking retrospectively for pre-Bloomfieldian champions of mentalism who could be posthumously resurrected as avatars heralding his own approach to linguistic theory. Despite this, Chomsky also expressed his criticism on Sausurre's failure to present lange as a system of generative rules.

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